Self-image and self-preservation

Before there can be tastes and preferences there must be self-image and the impulse to self-preservation. 

Those sentiments center on the decision-maker’s person rather than on the material objects that would make him happy or sad. When the decision-maker's self-image is poor because he is distraught about his station in life and his future, and when the decision-maker's impulse to self-preservation has weakened because his ideological environment repeatedly calls him to sacrifice himself for some glorious, distant, future vision, then the decision-maker is primed to mass himself anonymously and to surrender himself to some ecstatic, charismatic, demi-god leader/savior. That's the European version of the process. There is, no doubt, a Middle Eastern version, an African version, a Far Eastern version, an American version – North and South, etc. 

In all the cases, however, what is lacking in the self-understanding of the individual decision-maker is a sense of dignity and autonomy. Discouragement, hopelessness, despair are the precursors to anger, hatred and resentment. The abundance and bounty God affords mankind is meant first of all to imbue in man, in each person, a sense of substance, which substance is the basis of dignity and the reason people want to preserve themselves. 

When people have lost their impulse to self-preservation they have lost their dignity and they have been hollowed out, spiritually. That hollowing out can come about as easily in a religious setting as it can in a secular one. The ultra-Orthodox and the hip hop, disco, party girl share the same hollowed out loss of dignity. They are empty.